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Two Workers

Here’s a worthwhile discovery: King Rogers Seafood and Deli has a nearly two-for-one deal that is hard to beat. King Rogers is a cinderblock po’boy shop at the busy, smoky place where St. Claude Avenue, North Rampart Street, and St. Bernard Street meet. It’s simplicity itself: a counter, a white board announcing the menu and prices, a drinks cooler. The menu, however, is extensive, running from fried sea-trout po’boys, at $3.99, to a crawfish étouffée plate served with two sides in a plastic-foam clamshell box, for $5.99. “Be patient,” a hand-lettered sign commands. “Everything is cooked to order.” The food is spectacular. And if you order two items exactly the same, down to the fixings, the second costs only a dollar. Not surprisingly, it’s a popular spot for pairs of workmen at lunchtime.

Two Hispanic guys were being patient the other day, waiting for their lunch. One was tall, ropy, and bearded; the other was short and moon-faced. Both were Jackson Pollocked with Sheetrock mud. Always eager to use what little Spanish I have, I struck up a conversation with the taller one, whose name was Jesús Raymundo Avalos. He is from Guadalajara, but has been living in Michigan for the past few years. He eagerly produced his permanent-resident, or green, card (it’s really white) from a stuffed and disorderly wallet. It didn’t take long for him to launch into a story nearly identical to one we had heard from the five Hondurans who live across the street from us, and from any number of other Spanish speakers who had flocked to New Orleans after the storm to do badly needed reconstruction work. “We did three weeks of work for a contractor—Sheetrock—and then he didn’t pay us,” Avalos said. “He owes us fifty-two hundred dollars. Look, we’re reporting him.” He produced a tattered folder and a copy of a letter to the Louisiana State Licensing Board for Contractors, reporting the contractor and asking the state to intervene.

His moon-faced friend finally spoke up, in thoroughly American, Chicago-accented English. His name is Facundo Gonzales, Jr. “I’m a citizen, born and raised in Chicago Heights, Illinois,” he said. “I don’t know who they think they’re fucking with. I always hang back and say nothing. They think, We can rip these fucking Mexicans off—what are they going to do? This isn’t the first time this has happened, and it’s pissing me off.”

(I later called the contractor who they said had cheated them. I’ll withhold his name, because I don’t know the veracity of their claim. “I don’t like to discuss my business with someone I don’t even know,” the contractor said, and hung up.)

Avalos and Gonzales received identical smoked-sausage po’boys, wrapped in long torpedoes of white butcher paper, and said that, for all the work that needs to be done in New Orleans, actual paying jobs are in short supply. Until the state figures out how to get the billions in federal housing dollars into the hands of the hundred-thousand-plus families that have applied for aid, nobody can afford to hire. “You got all this work, and all these people to do it,” Avalos said, making the pinching gesture with curved thumb and forefingers that Mexicans use to connote money. “And there’s all that money waiting to be spent, and nobody can get it.”

But the cheating of Hispanic workers is becoming “epidemic,” Gonzales said, and that alone could hobble the city’s recovery. “People are going to hear about it and stop coming to New Orleans to work,” he said. “We don’t want that to happen.”

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